Splash Damage CEO feels some single-player shooters can be a bit too restrictive

Splash Damage CEO Paul Wedgewood feels that single-player shooters can be too restrictive, so with Brink, the studio tried to change things a bit.

Speaking with Gamasutra, Wedgewood said he hopes players will take the time to learn the mechanics of the game instead of just enjoying it as a ” run-and-gun.”

“If we put you on a minecart and play the same cinematics, it would feel more like a traditional single-player game,” he said. “But, to me, the definition of single-player is simply a game that you can have fun playing on your own. It’s the important thing that defines single-player gaming. To be single-player doesn’t mean you have to look and feel and breathe like every other linear, single-player shooter.

“Now, the thing is, RPGs don’t feel like big action cinema, and yet people have really great fun playing them. RTSs don’t feel like action cinema, but they’re great fun to play on your own against the AI.”

Wedgewood feels that the shooter genre is viewed in a more restrictive manner, and that “third-person action adventures and shooters,” can become stuck in “the mold of constant constraint and removal of player interactivity.”

Because of this opinion, Splash Damage designed Brink around “interactivity and emergent gameplay,” instead of with “orchestrated, scripted, canned cinematics,” which cannot be changed and only played the same way over and over again.

“A better comparison is to think of something like a racing game,” Wedgewood explained. “With the racing genre, you can have great fun playing on your own, and you can have great fun playing against other people. Obviously, the story mode — the campaign mode — is a lot lighter than a traditional story-driven game. We try to be somewhere mid-point.”

You can read the excerpt from the full feature here, or the full thing through here.

Brink is out in the US now, hits the UK on Friday, as has had its latest update detailed along with plans for one in the near future.